1-1 Interview: Joesph Kosinski on Tron Legacy

Tron Legacyhits Blu-ray today, and we were given a chance to sit down with director Joesph Kosinskito talk about the film now that the film is over and done with. He was revealing about the film and its reception, and he talked about the struggles of big budget film making, and creating the sequel, along with what might be to come. Take a look.

Tron Legacy on Blu-ray is excellent, with the picture and sound (7.1 DTS-HD) excellent. At the event, we were shown the second screen application for the movie, where if you have the film on Blu-ray you can watch the film with your laptop or iPad and look at stills, drawings and motion footage from the film. The disc also comes with a promo movie tie-in that leads to (if you can guess the codes) bonus footage, and some featurettes.

Wrap up:

Do you feel done with the film?

Joe Kosisnki: With Legacy, yes. I’m excited about it going out on Blu-ray, especially with the original film. It feels good. A lot of people who didn’t catch it in theaters are going to discover it, and I think they’re going to be pleasantly surprised.

How involved were you with the Blu-ray?

JK: Heavily. I supervised the transfer, and I was lucky enough to go back to Skywalker in January, because there were a number of things I want to fix, that I couldn’t get to. I made about 120 changes to the audio.

I want to say it was George Lucas who said “movies aren’t released, they escape.” Is that how you feel about this?

JK: Absolutely, on a movie like this the amount of post production – those last couple months were twenty-four seven insanity. It was nice to go back to make sure it was the movie I wanted to put out there. I can’t sit down and watch it, maybe in a couple of years from now, but I’m really proud of it. We set out to be ambitious, and I think we were.

How many times have you seen the film?

JK: A couple hundred times. I watched it every day for eighteen months.

What’s Next:

I have to ask, what’s going on with Oblivion?

JK: Oblivion right now, we’ve got a script and we’re trying to find the right home for it at another studio. It’s just outside the box of something that Disney can make right now, which we always knew. But I wanted to give it a shot with them, and we tried hard to make it work, but ultimately it was a square peg, round hole type thing. We couldn’t fit it inside the Disney box, and they didn’t want me to change it to fit inside that box because then it wouldn’t be the movie I wanted to make. So they were gracious enough to let me make it somewhere else.

You mentioned being done with Tron Legacy, are you working on the next one?

JK: We’re currently working on a script for the next chapter. We want to have a script ready, we want to have the right story together, and we’ll see after the TV’s out, and the Blu-ray’s out for a while, if we’ve built a bigger fanbase, at that point, if we can get the team back together to pitch the studio.

Afterthoughts

What was your favorite part about the process?

JK: People don’t understand with a movie like this only a little piece of it is actually directing. It’s a four year process, but we only shot for three months of it. Shooting on a full set with actors in costume, that’s the highlight, that’s what you work for.

Francis Ford Coppola described big budget filmmaking as trying to write a story with an enormous pencil, as this was your first film, how do you feel about the process?

JK: It’s a challenge. The great thing about the second screen application (for Blu-ray) is that you can get a hint of the amount of work that goes into bringing something like this together. It’s tremendously difficult, but the opportunity to take people to a new place – a new world – is exciting. It comes down to having a great script and great characters, which is always the difficulty with movies – regardless of scale. It’s fun to be pushing the envelope.

Does that make you want to do something smaller?

JK: Yeah, but I have all these sci-fi pictures on my plate. I like to build worlds, and I like the big ideas that you can have in sci-fi. These are really hard movies to make, but after these it would be nice to do something outside of genre.

You said “world building”, which reminds me of Ridley Scott, who I’m sure is an influence, what movies do you love?

JK: Ridley’s huge. Star Wars, yeah, I mean I grew up in the early eighties. Raiders of the Lost Ark blew my mind. But I also love Antonioni, he was an architect turned filmmakers. L’Avventura is my favorite, the music, the lifestyle. You can put one of his movies on and you can instantly it’s his, I feel the same about David Fincher, and Stanley Kubrick. 2001, obviously. Recently, I loved Catfish, and the documentary Inside Job.

Tron Legacy is on Blu-ray and DVD now in a various number of versions. Check it out.

Damon worked in the film business as a Film Buyer for a theater chain for many years, which gives him an interesting perspective on the numbers. He's written for Collider, Chud, Screencrush, The DVD Journal and Binaryflix online, and was published by The New York Times and Willamette Week, along with his college, high school and middle school papers.